Clemenceau government

On 16 November 1917 France had a new government. Three days after the fall of Painlevé’s cabinet, Georges Clemenceau became prime minister, keeping the ministry of war for himself as well. His long-standing friend Stéphen Pichon became foreign minister, and the newly created ministry of blockade and liberated regions was taken by Senator Charles Jonnart. The American monthly Current History noted that the cabinet had been assembled in less than 48 hours after the fall of its predecessor, which was considered a record for speed. The date of 16 November is given by the British chronology of the war and by French lists of the governments of the Third Republic.

The Tiger

Clemenceau was 76. He was born on 28 September 1841 in the Vendée; a doctor by training, he was a journalist and politician by inclination. As a young man he taught for a time at a school in the United States and married an American. From the 1870s he was one of the leaders of the radical left, known for his sharp tongue. For bringing down one government after another he was called the “wrecker of cabinets”, and for his ferocity in political struggle “the Tiger”. During the Dreyfus affair he was one of the leading writers of the daily L’Aurore, in which Émile Zola’s famous letter appeared. It was Clemenceau who gave it the title J’accuse…!. In 1906–1909 he was prime minister and minister of the interior, and his government was remembered among other things for its hard line against strikes.

From the start of the war Clemenceau was the harshest critic of successive cabinets. His daily L’Homme libre, suspended by the censors as early as the autumn of 1914, changed its title to L’Homme enchaîné (“The Man in Chains”). As chairman of the Senate army committee Clemenceau attacked the government over shortages in the army’s supplies, and in July 1917 he accused the interior minister Louis Malvy in the Senate of indulging the pacifists and betraying the interests of France. He became the voice of all who believed that the country would lose the war not at the front but at home.

Poincaré’s choice

President Raymond Poincaré and Clemenceau had been enemies for years. In 1913 Clemenceau had done everything he could to prevent Poincaré becoming president. According to the French historian Michel Winock, however, the president in practice had a choice between Clemenceau and Joseph Caillaux, a former prime minister who was regarded as a supporter of a compromise peace and was ever more loudly accused of intriguing on Germany’s behalf. Poincaré preferred the man who promised victory. The socialists and Aristide Briand were opposed. According to Winock, the socialist Marcel Sembat warned the president that Clemenceau’s appointment would provoke an immediate revolt by the workers. Apart from the socialist press, however, the newspapers greeted the choice with enthusiasm.

The cabinet

The government was made up mainly of Radicals and moderates. It included neither the socialists of the French Section of the Workers’ International, who went into opposition, nor the conservative right. Most of the ministers were Clemenceau’s men or politicians without a strong position of their own. According to the American New International Year Book, only Pichon had already sat in his first government. Pichon was 60. Years before he had co-founded the daily La Justice with Clemenceau; in 1900, as French minister in Peking, he lived through the siege of the legation quarter during the Boxer Rebellion; and he had already been foreign minister in 1906–1911 and in 1913. He was considered an uncompromising advocate of recovering Alsace and Lorraine.

Jules Pams became minister of the interior, Louis-Lucien Klotz minister of finance and Georges Leygues minister of marine. The ministries of armament, commerce and public works were kept by Louis Loucheur, Étienne Clémentel and Albert Claveille. The ministry of agriculture was abolished and rural affairs were transferred to the minister of supply, Victor Boret. The prime minister’s most important collaborator was Senator Jules Jeanneney, under-secretary of state to the prime minister and the ministry of war, with the right to attend the council of ministers. Clemenceau’s civil cabinet was run by Georges Mandel, and his military cabinet by General Henri Mordacq.

The ministry of blockade and liberated regions was a novelty. Until then the French blockade had been handled by an under-secretary of state in the foreign ministry, most recently Albert Métin. Now it was to be directed by a minister who was also responsible for rebuilding the territory recovered from the Germans. Jonnart was 59, a senator for the Pas-de-Calais department and a former governor-general of Algeria, and in June 1917, as Allied high commissioner, he had forced King Constantine of Greece to abdicate. He did not stay long in office. After only a week he resigned, officially on grounds of health, and on 23 November he was replaced by Albert Lebrun.

“War, nothing but war”

On 20 November Clemenceau presented his programme in the Chamber of Deputies. “To win so that justice may prevail: that has been the watchword of all our governments since the beginning of the war. This programme, open as the sky, we shall maintain,” he said. He paid tribute to the soldiers and to the “silent soldiers of the factories”, the old peasants and the women working at home. He admitted that mistakes had been made and announced that crimes against France would be swiftly punished. “All the accused before courts martial. No more pacifist campaigns, no more German intrigues. Neither treason nor half-treason. War, nothing but war!” At the same time he promised a milder censorship, which was to cover military and diplomatic news but not opinions, and announced restrictions on consumption on the British, Italian and American model. The Chamber gave the government a vote of confidence by 418 votes to 65. The socialists voted against.

Clemenceau worked at the ministry of war in the rue Saint-Dominique and quickly showed that he was not joking. At the end of November the Chamber referred the Malvy case to the Senate sitting as a high court; in December it lifted Caillaux’s immunity, and in January 1918 the former prime minister went to prison. Clemenceau uttered his most famous sentence about his policy a few months later, in March 1918: “Home policy? I wage war. Foreign policy? I wage war. All the time I wage war.” He governed until January 1920 and went down in history as the “Father of Victory”.